Sunday, December 20, 2015

Lindy the Awesome and My Feelings on Our New Plans

Let me start out this blog post with a shout out to Lindy.
Lindy was my internship leader when I came to Papua New Guinea in 2010. We had mutual friends in Dallas prior to that, so while we ourselves didn't really hang out, sometimes Lindy was in the group that I was hanging out in, and we got to become friendly acquaintances through that.
Then we went on our internship. And Lindy gave out lots of wisdom on that trip, some of it being life-changing.

Well, I've been in town for only three weeks now and she's already at it again. One nugget, I'm pretty sure, is also life-changing, but it's too soon to say that definitively. I'll give it some time. And two are year changing at the least. Those I'll share here.

To say that I was displeased about our delay to allocate until October would be dull. In a more poetic fashion, it made me want to beat my head against the brick wall barricading my path in an obviously futile attempt to break through it.
10 years, my husband and I have been on this road. 10 years from the moment we decided we wanted to go to the mission field to the moment that we moved internationally. And there were many brick walls in that time frame. But we're finally here!!! And behold! Another brick wall!!  
And there's no source of my frustration. I can't be mad at any one because it's not anyone's fault. It's just... the way it is.

Hanging out. In town. Until October. AT THE EARLIEST!
GAH!
Patience isn't one of those things I was naturally blessed with.

But Lindy, in our Bible Study, pointed out our parallel to the nation of Israel after they crossed the Jordan into the Promised Land. That land wasn't yet theirs but they had finally arrived. They were in the Promised Land, but they weren't ready to settle.
And that's totally where we are. I felt called to PNG. Jacob felt called to missions where ever that may be. (We just figured it would be better if we stuck together, being married and all, so he came to PNG with me.) And after 10 years, which I'm just going to say, is a noteworthy fraction of the 40 years Israel spent in the wilderness. I mean, we're comparing the story of a Nation to the story of a Person, so... percentage-wise, I might be beating Israel in my time of wandering (fund-raising).
And now we're here! But not really. I mean, our feet are on Papuan soil, but we have no home here. Our purpose for being here isn't happening right now. We have to wait for that.

But when Israel crossed the Jordan, they weren't all about busting down some brick walls (the walls of Jericho) and rushing the process.
No. Step one was gathering 12 stones to stand as a monument to the work of the Lord in their passage across the Jordan. Step two was renewing their covenant to the Lord.

Now. The nation of Israel isn't really who you want to be modeling your life after. As many times as the Lord considered smiting all of them (and actually did smite large fractions of them from time to time), we need to take the actions of the nation of Israel with a grain of salt. 
So why did they stop and remember rather than bust down some walls? Because the Lord told them to. 
Ok. That's a pretty good reason. Whenever the nation of Israel does what the Lord tells them to, we should follow suite, until the Lord gets mad at them again, and then we should evaluate what they did wrong. 

Now, the other thing Lindy said in an entirely different setting, is that she was really glad I was here. That there are reasons for all of God's timings and, that while she knew it was beyond frustrating for me, she herself was glad I would be in town for a while for self serving reasons. Now, I don't really get this, because I'm not the one spouting off tons of edifying wisdom all over the place. But it is encouraging to hear that she feels like there's a reason for me to be here in town longer. It is encouraging to know that while this isn't the purpose that I foresaw for my first year and I trained for and I prayed for, there is purpose for my time in town. And maybe it's only to hang out with Lindy. And if so, that's totally ok. Because Lindy is pretty cool and she influences me to be a better person.
Maybe there's another purpose for my being here that hasn't been revealed to me.
Maybe it will never be revealed to me!

And that's ok. Because I'm the Lord's servant.
And it's not the servant's place to know the business of his Master.

Sometimes He does decide to reveal His business to His servants, and it's so helpful in understanding, it's so encouraging, and I'm thankful for Lindy pointing out at least one purpose for my perceived delay (which is really just God's timing).

But it's the occasions that He does reveal His business that should give us faith to continue obeying Him even when He doesn't, just as His provision in the past should give us the faith to believe He will provide for us in the now and the future.

 
So now it's our turn to follow Israel's example. To not rush forward but to remember this time and all the times before that the Lord has provided for us a way to complete the job we believe He has called us to. To become a part of a larger story of Bible Translation across the world, which is in turn part of a larger story of spreading the Gospel of Jesus Christ. A part of the larger story of God wooing His creation back to Him.
And to pay careful attention to what God is telling us to do, so we are able to fill every purpose the Lord has for our time here.

Pray for us. For wisdom in choosing a language group, for patience in the meantime, and for attentiveness to God's direction.
And pray for Lindy. Because she's awesome. Pray for her to be encouraged and to receive some great wisdom's that change her life for the better in greater quantities than she gives them.

Thursday, December 17, 2015

Looking Ahead

What the Plan Was

Our goal upon arriving in to town was to figure out which language group we would be working with long-term prior to leaving for Australia.
There are presently two language groups on the table. We will visit both language groups and spend time praying about whether or not God would like us to work with these people. If both groups are a no-go, then the next step will be survey work to see what other language groups are in need of translation in the Madang and Sepik Provinces of Papua New Guinea.

Why That's Not Going Down

However, due to the nature of the beast, it doesn't seem possible to begin visiting either of these places before we leave for Australia.
In the window of time we have after the Annual General Meeting (AGM) and before we leave for Australia, there are no helicopters that will be traveling in one of the areas, which would necessitate commissioning a helicopter, about $5000 round-trip. This is a hefty expense that gives us pause, especially coming into country under-funded.
The area around the other language group's village where our translators live is very rough hiking, made treacherous and arduous by the rainy season. One translator was delayed coming into town as a two hour hike from his village to the road took him two days.
While we're praying for other ways in to visit these places, the answer to our prayers maybe a command to be patient.

What We're Doing Now

In the meantime, we'll be working as any other town based team, serving in what capacities we can for the 17 different language groups that are considered Active with PBTPNG.
When we go to visit one language group, we'll be doing village checking (reading the current version with people who haven't worked on the translation to check for accuracy, clarity, and naturalness). Presently, I'm working on researching best practices for Village Checking, devising a plan for our checking session, and developing an extensive list of questions for the segments we plan to check.
After that, I'll probably work with teams of translators who need help when they come into town to work on their translations.
Jacob is working on morphophonemics for a suffix in that same language. When they add an ending to a word, they do it inconsistently, and Jacob is trying to figure out a rule for what's happening and how to make it consistently handled. He's also been developing job descriptions for some of our national literacy workers, which is very important because our work visas are contingent on us training and equipping nationals for employment. (That's how the government protects the jobs of nationals!)
After that he hopes to help said language group with some literacy work that they haven't been able to do for lack of literacy specialists in country. Jacob fills that void!

The Trip to Australia

We'll head off to Australia February 20th, my 34th week of pregnancy, the last minute in which we can travel internationally. Our medical visa is good for 3 months, so hopefully the baby won't delay and we won't have problems getting the baby's emergency passport and visa for travel to PNG!

Back in Country

When we return (May 20th), hopefully we'll already have a plan in place (devised while we were in Australia) to go visiting the two languages. And then it's a matter of getting out to visit both places and deciding if one of them is where we'll be allocating. If not, we'll start survey work. If so, however, we'll get started on preparing ourselves to allocate. This means getting our stove ($215), a solar panel system ($2,500), a water tank ($1,700), etc. and all the little pieces we need to set that up, figuring out how much food we'll need to bring and how we'll prep it for longevity (canning vs dehydrating), and starting a little bit of language learning as there are speakers of both languages who live in town!

Allocating at Long Last


Our target date to allocate is October (though needing to do survey work could easily throw that off schedule.)
This timeline also ensures that the new baby is 6 months old before allocating, giving the baby a chance to get a measles vaccine before we leave for the village.
So the goal is to spend 3 months in the village by the end of 2016! Oct, Nov, Dec!

Monday, December 14, 2015

5 Best Things About Living in the Village

Lest you think that our arrival in town was all town-loving and village-hating, let me share the 5, kinda big, things that we really loved about the village life:

  1. Relationship Building
    It was so so easy to get to know people in the village. Town is much like home in that respect. You come to know only the people at the places you go. Instead of pulling into a garage at the end of the day, we pull into our gated compound laced with barbed wire. Everyone's house is like this (though some people do walk). But coming to know your neighbors is hard.
    In the village, there is no barbed wire, because it's way harder to be a criminal when everyone knows everything. In the village, everybody walks. Everybody stops by and visits. There are some people you spend more quality time with than others, but you don't need to
    seek an opportunity to build relationships, you just need to sit on your porch.
  2. The Simple Pace
    Even when work was to be done in the village, it was a simple pace. Work 15 minutes tilling the earth and then take a break, drink a kulau (green coconut; or perhaps coconut water would be a more explanatory translation), eat some roasting taro kongkong (type of potato), then work another 15 minutes.
    There was no office to be at. No clock to worry about. They told time by sun (though, gauging by my watch, they were most often wrong…)
    The beginning of things was marked by hitting a garamut (a hollowed hunk of tree, that sounded like a deep rich drum resounding through the jungle). That was the signal to come and, when the most important participants arrived, that's when they would begin.
  3. The Community
    If someone had a large task before them, like sewing morota for an entire house, their whole family (which is often the entire village) would come to help make the work light.
    James was cared for by the entire village. Everyone loved the white baby who would eat anything. It was pretty much free babysitting all the time. 
  4. Spending Time Outside
    James loves loves loves to be outside. And, in the village, outside is where you spend your day, unlike town which has us in the house or in the office. (We live on the second floor and there's no baby rail on the stairs.)
    The scenery was gorgeous, the wind was lovely, and there were a plethora of animal to enthrall James.
  5. Price of Living
    Sure, we brought a pretty penny's worth of food to the village but there was no rent, electric bills, or water bills! (except for what you give to the nationals who haul your water for you as a thank you…) The people who live in the village have it even better with gardens which
    significantly reduces their grocery budget, cooking over a fire eliminating gas bills. And there's pretty much no reason for insurance for the nationals.


We are so very excited to move out to our village allocation and add the work of translation and literacy to the best things list!

Thursday, December 10, 2015

3 Hardest Things about Our Village Living with POC

First, let me take the time to distinguish between living in the village and Village Living with POC. The Pacific Orientation Course is a training course for survival and success in the Melanesian region. This is culminated in a "practical exam", where they drop you off in the village for a month, and hope to hear you're alive at the end of it. (Just kidding, they care more than I made that sound.)
But for a month stay, we were hardly set up in the Hyatt.
But it wasn't so much the quality of the accommodations (although, I have already mentioned the house layout) as it was the nature of the beast when considering the limited cargo we were advised to bring. When we get to bring what we want (/can afford) to bring, these problems likely won't be problems and we'll have to generate a new list!

  1. Limited Resources
    I touched on this in The Top 10 Things I Really Really Appreciate about Town Living. But there were three killer limited resources: water, power, and internet.
    • James' "sister" would haul water for us. We had three water buckets: 7, 5, and 3 gallons. We could normally get by for three days, being very conservative. But on the third day… Hopefully Jenipa hadn't gone to the garden or hopefully it had rained the night before and there was water in the missionary of yesteryear's tank. And our Berkey water filter, while amazing, filtered very very slowly. So if we filled up the head tank before we went to bed, and kept topping up throughout the day, we were normally fine. But woe to us if we had forgotten. And added woe if another family came a-visiting on such a day and asked for water. There were hours where Jacob and I sat in thirst, having given the last of the clean water to James, waiting for the enough drips to fall from the filter to satisfy our thirst. It was an oversight we didn't make often. It was the sort of thing where if an hour after going to bed, we realized we had forgotten, we would get up and get it sorted.
    • We had a small solar charger. When it's battery was full, it could charge my cell phone from dead for a few days in a row before running out. But even on the sunniest day, it could get enough solar power to replace what we used each day. So going out fully charged, it wouldn't be many days before it was dead and so were all of our phones. But my phone is my camera, so even on flight mode, it was anxious making to have it just dead. The phones are also our alarms. Our malaria medicine day got pushed back a day because we woke up and realized that with the phone's dead, we had forgotten. (We found out about half way into our stay that a friend had an impressive solar panel system and he would recharge our battery when we got low.)
    • In times when power wasn't scarce, internet was. We occasionally got better than 2G data. Guys. No internet is better than slow, unreliable internet. Shrugging and saying, "Better find something else to waste my life on" is way lass frustrating than "YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO WORK SO DO IT!" Though I think I was still in the village when I discovered that Instagram uploads pictures way better than Facebook. That was happy making.
       
  2. Brevity of Time
    I am problem solver, not a wallower. At 12, I read Wizard's First Rule by Terry Goodkind, and one thing that always stuck with me is the wizened old grandfather character's admonition, "Focus on the solution. Not the problem."
    So there were a bunch of little "problems".
    • My bed was on the floor so I had to sit up, tuck myself under the mosquito net, then hoist my pregnant belly into a squat before standing up from a squat. Luckily we're only talking 2nd trimester here.
    • The walk down to the water was really too ridiculous for me to manage, so I would take a cup bath in my room. Towering over a 2 foot wide basin and hoping to catch the water I pour over my head in it was ridiculous.
    • The place was a chaotic mess because there were no shelves, no places to put things.
Little problems with obvious and simple solutions, but we were only there for a month. Which was enough time to be bothered but not enough time to warrant fixing the problems. And that was the hardest thing of them all: having a solution to a problem but not being able to execute the solution because it wasn't worth it.
  1. The Proximity of the Rents
    No offense to all the parents out there, but we all know that there's a brief window of time when it's cool to crash with your folks. That window ends at 16 and you have to endure at least until 18. And moving back in is almost always really difficult. They're just there. All the time. And you have to interact with them. And coordinate life together. Instead of just being autonomous.
    Our wasfemili lived 10 feet from our front door. Given that our room was an oven, and our veranda was a veranda, and our hauskuk's door was outside our house, we pretty much lived in the same house. Just a very drafty house that had a tendency to rain between our living quarters and theirs.
    But they were right there. All the time. We couldn't walk to the hauskuk without having to exchange pleasantries. We couldn't go to the outhouse without having to exchange pleasantries. And sometimes, some days, you don't want to deal with that. I might even be so bold to say most days, you don't want to deal with small talk en route to the loo.
     
So when we get out to the village where we'll be living (TBD), we'll bring a water tank of some caliber, a solar panel system powerful enough to manage our power needs, a bed frame, that plastic thingy you line a shower with, and stuff for shelves, and we'll have more than enough time to solve problems.
In fact, I've told Jacob, I might be that person who slowly edifies and perfects a house until at the end of our term, we're like, "why bother with an Americanized house? Let's just lay a concrete foundation and call it a day." As long as the bones of the house are quality, it will really take no effort to tear down the woven bamboo walls when I tire of them and replace them with paneling.

We'll have to see how feasible that is, but I certainly like the idea!

Stay Tuned for the 5 Best Things about Village Living!

Wednesday, December 9, 2015

Top 10 Things I Really Really Appreciate About Town Living

As I was reading over my last effort at a blog post for typos, I was bored senseless. Which may just be because it's old hat to me now, but I'm going to go with, No, For Real, This is Boring. And not post that.
We'll jump that ship of Things I Learned in the Village For My Future Village Living, because really it's just housekeeping stuff, and, unless you care, no one cares.
So moving on!

Top 10 Things I Really Really Appreciate About Town Living

Not all of the following are untrue of village living, per se. But they were things that we were without during the village living portion POC (and many of them POC, too!) Hopefully, #8, 6, and 2, at very least, we will have in our village living time when we allocate.  But in this moment, right now, these are the things I'm appreciating.

  1. Microwaving Rice
    We had a single burner kerosene stove. So it was no joy to occupy it with a pot of rice, more than doubling the time we would spend cooking our meal in the already too hot hauskuk. 10 minutes in the microwave and it's perfect every time and waiting for us to hurry up with the entrée already!
  1. Driving
    Can I even express how much having a car makes me feel like an adult? PBT has lent us one of their fleet for driving around town while we're here and it is sooo nice to grab my car keys and walk out the door when I want to go somewhere.
  1. 2 Bedrooms
    This extends past village living, past POC, past our three months in Dallas, to the entirety of James' life. With the exception of a couple homes that we briefly stayed at on our PD trip across the world, James slept in our room. There was always worry of waking him. And now, we keep it down, of course, but there's no need for silence.
  1. Stores
    You know when you're like, "I would really like _________" so you jump in your car and head to the store and grab what you want and go home? Yeah, in the village that doesn't happen so easily. Now there's no Walmart here and I fiercely miss being able to stop at one store and get everything I need and go home, but compared to village living, many things I need are just down the road.
  1. Power
    We had an ill-equipped solar charger in the village. It could only get enough power from the sun each day to charge my phone to 60%, though it's battery was capable of doing much better. Constantly fretting about whether my phone was in flight-mode or off and if I would have enough power for those Kodak moments… It was stressful. I'm not used to limited resources. (Even at POC, we had one outlet and one plug adapter.)
  1. Free WI-FI
    We got internet in the village and at some points it was even faster than the office internet, but the office internet is free and when you're paying for the mb (THE MEGABYTE! For comparison, cell phone plans are sold by the gigabyte (1024mb in a 1gb) and home internet plans are sold on the speed with UNLIMITED INTERNET! We don't have that) free is so so nice.
  1. Indoor Plumbing
    When your options are going to a spider infested outhouse down a muddy hill or using a bucket which then needs to be emptied in said outhouse, a toilet really does look like a porcelain throne.  Also not having to worry about the water, that was hauled a 10 minute hike uphill, running out when washing dishes or drinking is really nice.
  1. Morning Sounds
    The ocean is two blocks from our house. I can see it through the palm trees on days when it doesn't perfectly match the sky. …I guess even then I can still see the ocean, I just can't discern the ocean… But the sounds of the waves crashing on the rocky shore wafts through the silence to greet us in the morning and it's much more lovely to wake to than roosters, who do NOT say cock-a-doodle-doo, but scream like a woman being murdered right outside (and many times under) your house.
  1. Cushions
    This was another thing that in the village, we were like, "we cannot leave for village living again without:" cushions. I mean, I can sit on the ground or a wooden bench as well as the next guy, but not all day every day forever. I would wake up in the morning, sit on a trunk to drink coffee, and moan at the soreness that had not alleviated during the night. Here, the cushions aren't great. I can still get sore. But comparatively?  Really really appreciated.

  1. The Refrigerator
    Guys. Friends. Supporters. Loved Ones. I can not tell you. how many times. in the village. I have said. "Everything would be so much easier to handle if I just had ice." I mean, really, village life wasn't overwhelmingly rough but there were some key stressors and if I could just have some cold water, or Pepsi, or Mio enhanced water, or whatever, I could really say, "I hear you annoying me right now, but I really don't have time to focus my attention on you because right now I have an ice cold glass of water that demands my appreciation."
    Pulling a pitcher of water out of the refrigerator here...
    Guys.
    Friends.
    Supporters.
    Loved Ones.
    I had forgotten water
    could be that cold.
     

Saturday, December 5, 2015

Village Time in Wasabamal - The Hauskuk

How many times have I sat down to write a blog about our month in the village?
It's just so broad of a topic.
It's like when I come visit a place and ask what's new.
"Oh. Same old, same old."
And it's pretty unlikely that nothing new has happened in anyone's life since I last saw them, which is often a solid chunk of time. But the question is so broad that, unless something really major happened, it just seems like there's nothing worth reporting.
But I hate it when people answer that way. Because it ends the conversation. So I'm going to try.

…..
Ok here goes!

My main objective going out to the village was different than most of the students at POC*. While they were going out to get a taste of how people lived in the village on the day-to-day, we had already seen and experienced that during our time in Anguna in 2012 and my time in Samban in 2010. So our objective was to figure out how we were going to live life in the village on the day-to-day.


So the first thing, I guess, is house layout. When you're doing tiny living, layout and organization is key. Our space was about 350 sqft. The hauskuk (kitchen) had a dirt floor, where the rest of the house was on stilts. A window from the "veranda" (or room with windows, as I would call it) had a window opening into the hauskuk (which was very nice for passing things up and down!) That was the only window in the hauskuk. And it had a copper roof. So, needless to say, it was hot. But I digress. The hauskuk had a door that had been repurposed into a table. Which would have been enough space if we didn't need to set our stove and "sink" (two wash basins) somewhere. So we prepped at the table on the veranda and passed things up and down through the conveniently located window. But then Jacob was in the hauskuk manning the fire and washing dishes while I prepped the food. Well, this isn't really culturally appropriate behavior for a man.

Yes, yes, I hear your outrage and indignation at outdated gender roles. Yay feminism, boo dominance in the name of tradition. But this actually ends up being a mysticism issue. My sources tell me that Papua New Guineans believe in something that they do not call, but we would, juju. And a man engaging in woman's work is bad juju. And if you try to do things with a man with bad juju, then those things won't go well. So people may like Jacob just fine and recognize that he's serving his wife and that's all fine and good, but as long as they believe in juju, Jacob will be ostracized from various things. And that's not really a good position for a missionary to be in. So we'll combat juju when we can do it in ways that won't jeopardize our ability to share the Gospel, and where we can't, we'll trust God to as He transforms lives in Papua New Guinea.

Observe the inlaid basins
So we need a better hauskuk layout for sure, to maximize square footage.
An area for prep.
We'll bring out a more real stove ($215), so it won't demand counter-space (and to have more than one burner, and an oven! And not have to stand on tip-toes to look into the pot! Oh, I'm swooning!)
Windows. It was so hot, it was miserable to be in there.  
A spot to have my wash basins in the counter, you know, like a real sink.
And a pantry sized rat box (a box that rats have trouble getting into (rats can chew through concrete. You can't really keep them out but you can make it more of a hassle than it's worth).
....



Bam! Look at that! That's a decent sized blog post! With a description of our time in the village, a cultural tidbit, and a glance at the future?! Nailed it!
Let's see if I can pull off a continuation of at least equal quality tomorrow!



*Pacific Orientation Course - The three month training course on how to survive in the jungle that was concluded with a month stay in the village and just successfully completed by us!

Friday, December 4, 2015

Missing A First World Christmas

I'm going to say words. Because they're true and honest. Not because I have regrets. But because I have feelings.

One of the hardest things right now in this Holiday Season so far from home is that I'm a first world girl in a third world country. (I know. You thought I was going to say family. But really, I had braced myself for that. That was an expected struggle. This caught me unaware.)

I miss the hustle and the bustle of the holiday season. I miss putting on my pea coat and scarf and boots (oh! How I miss boots!) and going to the mall, all decked in Christmas cheer with seasonal music playing and people with parcels talking and laughing as they flit from store to store. I miss going to Starbucks and getting my red cup, regardless of what design is or isn't on it. A triple grande peppermint white mocha. And I miss looking through their ornaments and mugs and watching people pass by the glass windows while my coffee is being hand crafted. And I miss following whoever I'm with as they work on their Christmas shopping, because, let's not play, my income level was on the low side, so I wasn't actually involved in much consumerism myself.
And I miss finding the exact something I was looking at in the mall (but was a little too expensive to buy for myself, especially during the holidays) under the tree, because the person I was following saw me eyeing it and thought to get it for me.
I miss the spirit of giving that's found back home with all the atmosphere of the season mixed in. (Not that there's not a spirit here! These are some of the most generous people I've ever met, but the atmosphere is a little lacking…)
I know that the spirit of giving can become a little corrupted with the spirit of receiving and consumerism, but for a lot of people, I think that the "pagan" aspects of Christmas still have Christ at the heart, reflecting His gift to the world in our gifts to each other.
And I miss the whole shebang.

Here, stores have some garland and a garishly decorated tree. Sometimes Christmas music is playing but often it's a bit odd… Like the mash-up of Hark the Herald Angels and Dame La Gasolina we heard the other day. And it's really no weather for a pea coat and the lightest of scarves would be stifling. The other day I thought it felt like a nice spring day and looked to see it was 90*. 

How I miss all the little things "The Season" entails…
But even while I get tucked into bed with visions of lattes dancing in my head, I know that the reason for the season is Christ coming to the world for everyone. Even these people with tacky Christmas trees and an utter lack of winter here in Papua New Guinea. And we're here, my little family of 3 1/2, to help see transformed lives, through translation, literacy, and incarnational living. To help those far from God, to help the skin Christians (nominal Christians), and to help those with the cargo cult mentality (a mix between consumerism and the prosperity gospel) be raised to true life through the most precious gift of all: Christ Jesus.

So I'll download a Christmas music playlist, and decorate my house as pretty as I can, and watch Christmas movies, all shamelessly in the name of teaching my son American culture so he won't return to America as a bushkanaka (jungle hillbilly). And while I'm relishing in the semblance of Christmas culture I have cultivated here, I'll busy myself with work to help bring the Good News of the birth of Christ to the people here in their heart language, so that it can truly change their hearts.  

All of our work is done through generous people who are willing to give a bit of their income to the Bible-less of Papua New Guinea. If you would like to extend the Spirit of Giving this Holiday season to this ministry, whether through a special gift or a monthly commitment, you can check out our giving page or email me personally and I can let you know how you can help! Thank you!